Abstract

This introduction to a collection of Australian writing from the 1890s surveys the ways in which Australian literature responded to a set of social, cultural, and political problems that were typical of the empire and yet richly inflected by local experience. In the last twenty years our view of this period has been transformed by a new generation of criticism. The fraught relations between the literature associated with the Bulletin, the burgeoning Labour movement, the first wave of feminism and a set of liberal ideas which led to the formation of an imperially loyal and yet reformist bourgeois State have been reinvestigated and new questions asked. This essay considers the writing of the 1890s under the headings: The Legend of the Nineties; The Labour Movement; Feminism; Spirituality; Imperial Frontiers and the Indigene; A Liberal Nation; and The Cultural Heritage.